Talk:L. Sprague de Camp
Huh, Howard and de Camp were close contemporaries, but Howard's body of work had been completed in its entirety (as had his life) when de Camp was just getting started. Kind of like Shakespeare and Marlowe. Turtle Fan 16:51, November 8, 2009 (UTC) :Except Shakespeare didn't complete any of Marlowe's unfinished works or write sequels to Dr. Faustus. TR 00:20, November 9, 2009 (UTC) ::Well the basic dynamic was there: one, in a very short life, produced a body of work on a par with the other, who lived much longer. Turtle Fan 03:18, November 9, 2009 (UTC) Hey, remember in VO when Flora was musing on how "Worlds of If" novels had become popular in the last few years? I thought of that because de Camp is considered to have written the first AH novel for mass audiences in the modern era. It was serialized in '39 and published in one volume in '41. I think Flora's musings came in 1940. In TL-191 it would appear AH got an earlier start. Perhaps all the tweeness around them had made the people living in that universe aware that their history pivoted on a few key chance moments? After all, they invariably chose to write about events which happened in OTL. No one asking what would have happened if Douglas had been elected, or the Brits had won the Revolution, or Napoleon had defeated all his enemies, or the US had won MWII. Turtle Fan 17:25, June 8, 2010 (UTC) :I did often wonder if HT was doing something more with that AH stuff than tweedom. At the minimum, the AH references did seem to comment on how much ACW AH there is in OTL, and that we are probably as obsessed with it as that world was. One thing that did strike me was that the various ideas, like North won WoS, still didn't translate into a world exactly like OTL. TR 19:17, June 8, 2010 (UTC) ::It's like HT wrote in his intro to "M&S" in CU,CD: If you were to fight the Civil War one hundred times, the Union would win ninety. So the most fertile ground for ACW fiction is a United States that survived the ACW by different means than OTL, and how those different means made for a different US political culture moving forward. Since HT seems to be the only AH author who understands this, I find myself wishing he'd do more than just the one short story. ::Personally I'm very interested in a war in which the Union wins within a year, and doesn't have to dig deep. Maybe Virginia doesn't secede, so its manpower and its generals play for our team. Then the Deep South is crushed and the Union preserved, but without laying the foundation for the military-industrial complex that would make the USA a deadly dangerous enemy in the twentieth century. ::Another wrinkle to put into this would be, if there were no further secessions after Fort Sumter, then more slave states would be fighting for the Union than against it. Surely that would make it much, much harder for abolitionists to wed their political goals to the nation's war aims. So the question of slavery would remain unresolved. Wouldn't that be more interesting than an endless barrage of Trent Affair stories? Turtle Fan 20:24, June 8, 2010 (UTC) :::I think so. Based on HT's intro, he seems to think so. My suspicion is that most publishers don't think so, or more accurately, don't think the vast majority of readers would think so. Hence the "South Wins Civil War" glut, and the rising number of "Brtain sides with South; World War I follows" stories. These are nice simple High Concepts where the implications are immediate to people who aren't ACW buffs. Even M&S, which boils down to "North wins ACW, South becomes Northern Ireland" requires just a tad more understanding of the ACW than the previous concepts, and so might not hook enough readers. TR 20:37, June 8, 2010 (UTC) ::::M&S disappointed me in its simplicity after reading that introduction (I knew nothing about it before seeing it in CU,CD.) ::::I guess these are the tradeoffs we make to have AH in the hands of mass market entertainers. They're worth it: I've read several collections of AHs written as essays by professional historians, and while they find more interesting PODs, they're unsatisfyingly noncommital in following them. A lot of "Maybe B would have happened, or maybe C would have happened, which might in turn have led to either D or E. It's even possible F would have happened, but it seems almost certain A would not have happened, where A is events as they transpired in OTL." ::::Shifting gears a bit, historical fiction set in Tudor England has gotten pretty popular the last five or ten years. Maybe AH writers will try to cash in on that market. There's no reason to assume those would be any less obvious than existing AHs, but at least it would be something different, and it would be a few years before anything got hit hard enough to become the kind of cliche we have in ACW and WWII. I suspect the most popular POD would be Mary coming out of Catherine's womb with a penis. Interestingly, that would mean everyone who tried his or her hand at the story would get carte blanche to write the central character however the author pleases, though of course events prior to, umm, Mario attaining his majority would progress in such-and-such a way regardless of what his personality was. Turtle Fan 23:44, June 8, 2010 (UTC) :::::Ironically, I was thinking about such a POD last night (not Mary is a boy specifically, but a Healthy Male Tudor). As for the rest of it, I think we have the Showtime TV series to thank for part of the renewed interest in the Tudors. If that translates to AH, I'm game. ::::::Another possible POD might be if Rome had not been sacked in 1527. Then Clement would not have had to be quite so concerned about offending the Hapsburgs, and might have been willing to anull Henry's marriage to shore up Catholic England against the emerging reformers. You know, it's incidents like this that make me glad the papacy is no longer overly concerned with geopolitics. Wow, what a profound statement. ::::::Anyway, the Showtime show only debuted in spring of '07. Novels about the Tudors were a force to be reckoned with long before that: Philippa Gregory, Robin Maxwell, Jean Plaidy, Rosalind Miles, Alison Weir, Margaret George, et cetera et cetera et cetera. That list has continued to grow since '07, with Hilary Mantel and Carolly Erickson and Kate Emerson getting into it. Also, last year Broadway offered two plays set in 16th-century England, one on Thomas More and one on Mary Queen of Scots. ::::::Here's a problem: What does every single name on that list of authors have in common? Every one of them a feminine name. And they've mostly written for female audiences. Now that's not a hard and fast rule--I've read a few of them, and Mantel in particular is attracting a significant male following--but by and large Tudor historical fiction is written by women for women. I can only think of one novel set in 16th-century England in the last decade that was written by a man, and it's our own Ruled Britannia. ::::::AH is usually written by men for men--again, not always, but offhand I can think of only one female AH author (Mary Gentle) and one woman I've ever noticed read an AH novel (The Years of Rice and Salt, and she didn't like it much. I hadn't liked it much either, so I advised her not to kill herself to finish it.) So we're going to need a shift in demographics to get Male Tudor Baby to join Operation Sealion Succeeds and Confederate Courier Recovers SO 191 on the list of PODs that make us roll our eyes. Turtle Fan 02:14, June 9, 2010 (UTC) :::::And taking "translate" and running in an absurd direction--I was uchronia recently, and discovered a German writer has begun his own Birmo-inspired work: a German WWI u-boat winds up in Ancient Rome and decides to try to prop up the Western Empire. I do wish they would translate that, as well as the couple hunderd other AH works written in a language other than English. TR 00:52, June 9, 2010 (UTC) ::::::I'm curious about what a single U-boat could do for the Western Empire. The only thing that suggests itself to me right away is sinking the boats carrying Saxons to Brittania, which would be ironic. If it were part of a fleet sent back to a preindustrial society, it might make a splash, a la Eric Flint's 1632 or Stirling's . . . what the hell is that series called . . . Now it's gonna piss me off. . . . ::::::Anyway, I too have often thought that foreign-language AH yields interesting PODs. Of course, most of them are probably as cliche to French or Germans or Italians as most American AH is to us. Still, an international AH exchange would at least have the effect of giving everyone something refreshingly different to read. For a little while, anyway. Turtle Fan 02:14, June 9, 2010 (UTC) Non-Appearance in BA So in Aaron Finch's last scene, HT goes back to his old fourth-wall-banger trick about "Gee, I wish someone would start writing AH!" But this time, it's a dozen years after Lest Darkness Fall was published. Given how often HT has waxed about that book's influence on him, I would have thought he'd be happy to give it a little tip of the hat within his own book. Instead, he sort of implies it doesn't exist in this timeline--though it was written long before the POD. Now of course one could easily assume that Aaron simply isn't familiar with it; but it would have been just as easy for HT to have had him read it. Then in one fell swoop he'd make a nod to de Camp, give hard-core genre fans like us a little Easter egg . . . and give a new twist to that tired old canard that just might have proven refreshing. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:18, August 20, 2015 (UTC) :Isn't that the scene where Aaron gives the example of the South winning the ACW and his wife gives the other example of the Nazis winning WWII? Aaron then replies that nobody would want to read a victorious Nazis story, a bit of self-deprecation towards Turtledove's own ItPoME. ML4E (talk) 21:59, August 20, 2015 (UTC) ::Yeah, that's the scene. And I guess there's some small interest value to be gleaned by the whack he takes at ItPoME and others like SD, but I would have found it a lot more interesting to have his characters read LDF. Turtle Fan (talk) 15:29, August 21, 2015 (UTC) Bigger article? This guy is already in Turtledove's Literary Influences, Co-Authors, and Creators of Shared Universes. Was this page supposed to be deleted?JonathanMarkoff (talk) 00:04, September 20, 2016 (UTC) :Maybe. It's an old article. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:47, September 20, 2016 (UTC)